Worlds apart

Concentrated poverty and an increasing income divide make San Antonio one of the country’s most segregated cities.

A four-part series by Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje | San Antonio Express-News

Chapter I: A ‘tale of two countries’

As incomes rise and prosperity spreads across certain parts of San Antonio, residents of downtrodden neighborhoods are being left behind – as they have been for generations.

Mercedes Martinez spooned scrambled egg onto a slice of white bread, then carefully held the folded sandwich up to her father’s mouth.

Jerry Martinez, 34, who suffered a stroke in 2014, took a bite, his arms shaking with tremors. Before his illness, he was a self-employed plumber who made a decent living. Now he’s partly paralyzed, barely can walk and speaks with a slur.

He lives with his wife and five children in Cassiano Homes, an aging public housing complex just west of downtown, in a neighborhood densely populated with people living in poverty.

The family gets by on food stamps, subsidized rent and Jerry’s disability check, reduced last year because he owes back child support to his first wife.

Every month, they come up short.

“I hide in the bathroom when I cry, so my kids won’t see,” wife Patricia said.

The Martinez family, for whom a modicum of financial stability collapsed under medical disaster, was among the more than 275,000 San Antonio residents living in poverty in 2015 -- or 19.8 percent of a population of 1.4 million. That’s higher than the statewide average of 17.3 percent but less than the 21 percent city poverty rate set in 2014.

Poverty has remained an intractable problem in Bexar County through the decades, the decennial census numbers toggling up and down since 1970, but never dropping below 15.5 percent, the most recent number. In contrast, the poverty rate for the nation as a whole was 13.5 percent in 2015.

While incomes have risen for many in San Antonio, prosperity has seemed out of reach for those living in perpetually downtrodden areas, particularly on the East, South and West side, where the poverty rate in some zip codes exceeds 60 percent.

Too often in these neighborhoods, economic hardship gets passed down from generation to generation, hobbling whole families and communities, trapping some residents in a permanent underclass.

As the nation continues to experience stalled wages, disappearing jobs and income inequality not seen since the 1920s, San Antonio struggles under a set of significant and interrelated problems — not just poverty but concentrated poverty, and a high degree of “residential segregation.”

That last is the term economists use for metropolitan areas that become balkanized — people with low incomes clustered in neighborhoods marked by poverty and those with middle- and upper-incomes living at a distinct remove, in more affluent environs.

Through the years, officials have sought to address San Antonio’s entrenched poverty through such programs as expanded pre-kindergarten and efforts to help at-risk youth attend college. Current strategies to combat the residential divide include mixed-income housing programs and an enhanced focus on workforce training.

On the East Side, an ambitious anti-poverty program called the Promise Zone aims to heal decades of neglect through better housing for the area’s poor residents, improved education and a host of other interventions.

But as these efforts continue apace, the separation between the well-off and poor remains stark, as concentrated poverty in San Antonio not only persists, but spreads.

“You see a divide in San Antonio you don’t see anywhere else,” said Steve Glickman, executive director of the Washington-based Economic Innovation Group. “There are huge disparities between ZIP codes, making the city not just economically segregated, but geographically segregated, to a shocking degree.”

These neighborhoods are not like “two different cities,” he said. “They’re like two different countries.”

Poverty is a scourge with many tentacles: substandard housing, low-performing schools, high crime, neglected infrastructure, family disintegration, poor physical and mental health and a lack of economic opportunity. Low-income residents often see little else, and prosperity remains a distant prospect.

Poverty — a family of four making $24,300 or less is considered poor — on its own is bad enough. Concentrated poverty tends to amplify and worsen its negative effects, setting up intractable cycles of struggle and despair.

As it has nationwide, concentrated poverty in San Antonio worsened in the years after the Great Recession in 2008, a recent study by the Brookings Institution found. This is especially true of “extremely poor” neighborhoods, where 40 percent or more of residents — or two of every five — are poor.

In just the post-recession period alone, the share of San Antonio residents living in such areas increased by four percentage points, from 12 to 16 percent.

“That can result from more low-income people moving into (the area), wealthier residents moving out or everyone just becoming poorer,” said Natalie Holmes, one of the study’s authors. “It differs by place.”

As far as the residential divide, these numbers from 2015 tell the story:

In the 78258 ZIP code on the North Side, one of the wealthiest, the poverty rate is just 4 percent. Only 2 percent of adults lack high school diplomas. Since 2010, the area has gained 20 percent more jobs and businesses, Glickman said. The median income per household is $106,036, almost double the 2015 state average of $55,653.

By contrast, in the 78207 ZIP code, where Cassiano Homes is located, 42 percent of residents live in poverty. Nearly half of adults haven’t graduated from high school, and almost six of 10 don’t have jobs. That ZIP code has lost businesses in the past four years. The median income per household is $22,894.

Among San Antonio’s 68 ZIP codes, almost half — 31 — have a poverty rate above 20 percent, the benchmark at which negative effects linked to concentrated poverty, such as high crime and school dropout rates, begin to emerge, studies show.

Concentrated poverty takes its harshest toll on children. A study by Harvard University in 2015 found that youths who grow up in such neighborhoods can have an exceedingly hard time rising from their circumstances into the middle class.

It rated how easy it was for children in the nation’s 2,000-plus counties to make their way up out of poverty. Bexar County ranked very low — 347th from the bottom, or better than only about 14 percent of counties nationwide.

It’s not just lack of access to high-performing schools and safe neighborhoods that impede low-income children, experts said. They also miss out on less tangible benefits, such as being surrounded by successful adult role models and a rich web of social networks.

“Those kinds of opportunities are harder to quantify, but we know they make a huge difference,” said Laura Speer of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. “We know that money and time spent on middle- and upper-income children, versus low-income children — things like academic enrichment programs, summer camp and so on — constitute a gap that has gotten dramatically bigger over time.”

The prosperity of the city’s northern and suburban areas serves to disguise how poorly other parts of the city are faring, Glickman said, camouflaging an income gap that doesn’t bode well for the future.

San Antonio does enjoy a “pretty big and resilient middle class, compared to a lot of places,” said Alan Berube, another expert with the Brookings Institution. Middle- and high-wage industries such as insurance, the military and health care, as well as manufacturers such as Toyota, offer skilled jobs. A recent influx of technology and other high-skill industries are bringing a new prosperity to some.

“But you have more poverty than other places, and the poor are poorer in San Antonio than the national average,” Berube said.

Poverty and the attendant residential divide grows out of a complex tangle of forces that touches on virtually every aspect of life — housing, wages, education, job training and government policies. Since economics serve as a proxy for race, San Antonio’s split also is along racial and ethnic lines, with low-income African-Americans and Hispanics clustered in high-poverty pockets.

Segregated city

The Martinezes are emblematic of what can happen when a family, having achieved a certain toehold in stability, is cast back into poverty and welfare dependency by an ill-timed catastrophe or two.

The couple, who have been married 17 years, were doing well until four years ago. Jerry had his plumbing business. Patricia, who didn’t finish high school and who had worked minimum-wage jobs since she was 13 — earning $7.25 an hour as a raspa vendor and working at a fast-food place and a call center — was able to stay home with their four children, since the cost of day care ate up any money she made.

Then, in 2014, their son Paul, 5 years old at the time, brought a sparkler into the home the family shared with Patricia’s parents, who grew up poor in Mexico. The firework set the house ablaze, burning it down. The couple lost everything. Placed on a public housing wait list that could be as long as seven years, they lived with friends, then went through what money they’d saved at cheap motels.

Finally getting the four-bedroom apartment at Cassiano Homes in October 2014 was a blessing, Patricia said — even with its dirt front yard, tenement feel and unsavory cast of characters circulating through the project, and despite the fact its area schools routinely post test scores and other measures below state averages.

But two months later, Jerry got blood sepsis after eating a tainted fast-food meal. He had a stroke in the hospital, where he ended up spending five months. In summer 2015, Patricia, who’d recently given birth to a fifth child, opened an $80,000 hospital bill each month. Every month, she couldn’t pay it.

Since they couldn’t afford his rehabilitation, Patricia and the girls did their own version, mimicking what they saw in the hospital — walking Jerry around the living room, getting him to sign his name. Patricia was up all hours of the night, either feeding the new baby or making sure her husband was still breathing. She herself suffers from high blood pressure and debilitating migraines.

Since Texas didn’t expand Medicaid coverage to most adults, even poor ones, she can’t get that help, nor does she make enough money to qualify for Obamacare coverage.

Bexar County’s uninsured rate among adults declined from 19.6 to 16.3 percent in 2015, largely due to the Affordable Care Act, but there were still more than 115,000 residents stuck in the “Medicaid gap” last year.

“It’s always on my mind: What if I get sick too?” Patricia said.

In November, she suffered a seizure and fell down the stairs inside her two-story apartment, breaking her jaw in three places. She had to undergo several emergency surgeries, at a cost of more than $100,000 — another bill she can’t pay.

By then, Jerry had recovered enough to consume his food by mouth, but since he lacked insurance, and the doctor refused to remove his stomach tube unless he could pay, the device stayed in place.

The specter of everyday disaster stalks people with low and fixed incomes, said former City Councilwoman Patti Radle, who runs a nonprofit organization that helps low-income families on the West Side.

“It takes very little to upset stability,” she said. “One blown-out tire, one sick kid — ‘Do I have to miss work? Will I lose my job?’ People live on the knife edge.”

Discriminatory practices

San Antonio wasn’t always a segregated city, geographically demarcated by rich and poor. In the 1800s, people at different levels of society tended to live and work relatively close to each other, said Char Miller, formerly of Trinity University and now a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College in California.

“In King William, for example, you had the owner of the flour mill and the worker who labored there living close to each other, although their houses may have been separated by the (San Antonio River),” he said. “The size of their houses was different, but they would’ve seen each other regularly, since everyone was always out walking. Then first the streetcars and then the automobiles expanded the city and thus widened the gulf between people. Distinctions between classes accelerated.”

The decisions of city leaders through the decades to build important institutions — the University of Texas at San Antonio, USAA, the Medical Center, other businesses — on the North Side, served to further move people and resources out of the central city, as Anglo residents moved to the suburbs and poverty became concentrated in the urban core in the 1960s and ’70s.

When some military bases and the Levi Strauss factory, both incubators of solid, middle-class Hispanic society, closed shop or left town, the fate was sealed for many older, central neighborhoods.

“We have substituted (those industries) now with tourism and low-wage service jobs,” Miller said.

Housing discrimination is another root cause, stretching back to the early and mid-20th century, when public housing projects like Cassiano Homes were built on less desirable sides of town. A separate practice involved a discriminatory policy called redlining, in which banks refused to give mortgage loans to those living in neighborhoods made up predominately of blacks and Hispanics.

This discrimination was compounded by restrictive covenants, in which landlords, property owners and Realtors banned the sale or lease of property to certain groups, namely blacks, Hispanics and Jews.

While now illegal, the legacy of these racist policies endures, experts say.

The historic difficulty of African-Americans and Hispanics to both buy homes and have the necessary funds to invest in their upkeep has played a large role in economic segregation, here and elsewhere, said Christine Drennon, an associate professor at Trinity University.

“Our income is attached to our home for most of us,” she said. “Our house is our savings account.”

Other factors impacting the poor and working poor in San Antonio are the same that have affected cities everywhere: companies moving manufacturing jobs overseas; the weakening of unions; the rise of automation; the technology-driven creation of a two-tiered class of American worker — the high- and low-skilled, with not much in between.

As the Republican candidate, Donald Trump tapped into largely Anglo working-class and rural anger over these issues during his successful bid for the presidency.

Another fertile field he plowed: Outrage over immigration. San Antonio’s economy has been impacted historically by an influx of immigrants from the south, particularly Mexico. This influx has slowed in recent times, being partly replaced by immigrants from Central America, a population that doesn’t have an outsized impact on the local economy, said Lloyd Potter, state demographer and director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research and the Texas State Data Center at UTSA.

Immigration in San Antonio, both legal and undocumented, has been a mixed bag, Potter said.

Immigrants here legally tend to affect the Texas and San Antonio economies in positive ways, “in that they tend to have higher levels of education, more resources and are more likely to work when they arrive, in jobs that make a living wage,” he said. Unauthorized immigrants tend to “not live a high quality of life, because they don’t have access to societal resources. They’re living in an underworld which, from a humanistic perspective, is less than ideal.”

Undocumented workers typically fill the low-wage, low-skilled labor slots that native-born citizens typically don’t want. But that, in turn, can create an overall downward pressure on wages for the native born, because the supply of labor is increased, he said.

San Antonio’s median income compared to other urban areas in Texas tends to be a bit lower, largely because we have a large Latino population, well over 60 percent, that “tends to have a lower level of educational attainment,” Potter said.

San Antonio’s relative reliance on low-wage service and tourism industries may be changing, Potter said. At the state level, the percentage of people employed in high-skill, high-pay occupations is increasing slightly, while the percentage of low-income, low-skilled jobs has declined slightly.

“My guess is that San Antonio is also seeing an increase in these high-skill, higher-paid jobs,” Potter said. While no formal studies confirm this, he said, anecdotal evidence suggests the growing pace of these higher-end occupations is tied to high-skill people moving here from other cities and states, as opposed to the occupational ascent of the native born.

City leaders ignore the continued problem of entrenched poverty at their peril, said Rogelio Saenz, dean of the College of Public Policy at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

“As long as we have these major pockets of poverty in San Antonio, it’s hard for the city to progress and attract good-paying jobs, no matter how many well-off people live in Stone Oak,” he said.

The toll of teen pregnancy

Advocates said teen and unplanned pregnancy plays a big role in San Antonio’s high level of poverty, but it’s hard to determine cause and effect.

“It’s a chicken-or-egg argument: Which comes first — poverty or teen pregnancy?” said Dr. Janet Realini, president of Healthy Futures of Texas, a nonprofit group that seeks to reduce teen and unplanned births in Bexar County. “I don’t think you can tease it out completely, but they’re very closely connected.“

Teen pregnancy is related to all sorts of social problems linked to poverty: low educational attainment, higher rates of incarceration, substance abuse, domestic violence and child abuse, both in the teen parents themselves and in the children.

“If you’re a teen parent, your chances of success in high school and college are often delayed and very often derailed,” Realini said — a pattern that can repeat itself in individual families and poor neighborhoods, generation after generation.

While the overall teen birth rate continues to decline in Bexar County, the number of births to females age 15 to 19 in in 2014 —2,412 — was still too high, experts say. Of those births, almost 540 were to teen mothers who already had one child.

Teen pregnancy is related to single parenthood, which in itself is linked to poverty. In the San Antonio metropolitan area, 31 percent of households are female-headed, yet they represent 57 percent of households living in poverty, according to an analysis by the Texas Women’s Foundation.

Single-mother-headed households are nearly twice as likely to live in poverty as single-father families. One in three children in Bexar County lives with a single parent, the study found.

Realini said various factors contribute to San Antonio’s high teen pregnancy rate — barriers to access to contraception, including cost and transportation issues, and young women whose futures are so circumscribed they see no real reason to postpone pregnancy. Other causes: Teens may be loathe to bring up the issue of birth control to parents; schools may avoid the subject in their abstinence-only curricula.

Ann Marie Ruiz, 36, a single mother of eight, lived with her children, who ranged in age from 5 to 21, in a three-bedroom apartment at Cassiano Homes for four years. In summer 2015, her son Jason, 15, had recently had a baby with his girlfriend, who also was 15. Another son, Rene, 21, worked as an inventory stocker at Walmart, making $7.50 an hour.

“It’s not permanent, though,” he said at the time. “I got it through a temp agency. I’m just living day-by-day.” Rene’s girlfriend was pregnant.

One afternoon, Jason picked up 2-month-old son Elijah from his car seat. The baby had thick black hair and mewled like a little lamb.

“It feels good to be a father,” said Jason, who received $800 a month from the government each month for an intellectual disability. “It’s good to have a blessing. Children are a blessing from heaven above.”

Another son also received a disability check, for attention-deficit disorder. Altogether, $1,600 in disability payments come into the home each month, Ruiz said.

At Cassiano Homes, a sprawling, 54-acre complex with more than 1,600 residents, most of them Hispanic, more than one-third of the 416 households subsist on government help, such as food stamps. About 23 percent get by on disability payments, Social Security income or pensions.

Another 39 percent earn wages through work or unemployment benefits. About 4 percent are “mixed” — earned wages or unemployment and fixed income.

Most of Ruiz’s children are on Medicaid, which covered the birth of Jason’s baby. Ruiz also got $733 a month in food stamps, but those often ran out: She watched three kids for a friend during the week; other kids from the complex also hung out in the apartment.

On that hot afternoon, when three box fans moved around what little cool air was coming from a wall unit, the four-bedroom apartment felt overstuffed. The stifling hot kitchen — separated from the living room by a hanging sheet — was grungy and overcrowded with kids, some in saggy diapers, imparting a Third World feel. But in the living room there was a big-screen TV, bought on credit. Each upstairs bedroom had a smaller TV.

Anne grew up poor, the child of a single mother, who worked as a seamstress. She dropped out of school in the 11th grade because it “just didn’t interest” her. She got pregnant the first time at 16. She worked in minimum-wage, fast-food jobs for years but, like Patricia Hernandez, quit seven years ago because she was just handing her paycheck to the day-care center.

“It just didn’t make sense,” she said.

Her eight children had three different fathers, only one of whom was still in his kids’ lives. He helped out Ruiz occasionally, giving her money for cleaning supplies and such. She was on the wait list for a Section 8 rental house, hoping her family could find some privacy. At the housing project, you can’t put a baby pool or trampoline in the yard because because it will get stolen, Ruiz said.

Within a few weeks, the voucher came through and the family moved out of Cassiano Homes.

Ruiz said at the time that she had dreams of becoming a diet supplement distributor. Yes, it’s hard to be a single mother, she said.

“But I don’t look at my life as a challenge,” she said. “If you wake up every morning viewing your life as a challenge, it will be that, but if you put your mind to it and face everything, it’s OK.”

Dreams for the future

Having two parents is no guarantee of a life free of poverty and segregation.

Tish and Cleo Booker, both of whom grew up poor, lived with four of their six children in a subsidized rental home in Beaumont, which had been rendered unlivable by Hurricane Ike. Cold air shot through holes in the floor; sewage smell seeped up from underneath. They lived in those conditions for six years, having no other options.

The family moved to San Antonio in 2014, hoping that subsidized housing options here might be more generous. They lived at the Salvation Army shelter for four months, all six sharing one room, until an apartment came open in Cassiano Homes in October of that year.

As a heat wave reached its peak in August 2015, the family struggled without air conditioning — only heat is provided at the project, Tish said. When one of the children’s teachers at Mark Twain Middle School learned they were enduring 100-plus heat with no relief, she provided a portable air conditioning unit. By September, the family was sleeping together in the living room, the only cool place — Cleo and Tish on the couch, bought at the Salvation Army, the four kids on a queen-size mattress on the floor, or on the floor itself.

The only piece of furniture was a kitchen table and a TV. The sweltering upstairs bedrooms were empty save for small piles of clothes.

Tish, 44, who has received disability for congestive heart failure since 2004, says she gets depressed, knowing she can’t give her children the nice clothes and expensive shoes they see on TV.

“I can’t give my children what they want, but I think they understand,” she said.

In San Antonio, 49,765 residents — those who used to be employed but no longer can work for health reasons — received disability payments last year, as well as 1,200 spouses and some 13,000 children, who get benefits through their disabled parents.

That’s 3.4 percent of the city’s 1.4 million population, an increase of more than 5,000 people since 2010. The average disability payment nationally is $1,165 a month.

Tish said life is hardest during the summer, when the kids’ free school breakfast and lunch programs end. She visits church pantries when the food stamps run out. That summer, she took out three quick-cash loans just to buy food, debts she pays every month but which never go down, because of their high interest rates.

Cleo, 56, a high school dropout and a former trucker, also receives disability for work-related back injury he suffered in 2001. Like Jerry Hernandez, his monthly disability payment recently was garnished for back child support he owes to another woman. The children he has with Tish each receive $158 a month because of his disability, until they turn 18.

Tish did graduate from high school. Her work career began at 17 and mainly involved fast-food restaurants. For three years, she worked as an aide in a nursing home in Beaumont but was fired when supervisors learned she wasn’t licensed.

In 2009, doctors implanted a defibrillator in her heart; she’s on nine different medications, each of which costs $1.01 a month, covered by Medicaid, Medicare and other insurance. Starting this fall, Tish also was being seen by an in-home hospice nurse, not because she’s dying but because of the severity of her heart disease.

She and Cleo want to see their children break the cycle of poverty, she said. On the wall above the saggy couch, they’ve taped up their kids’ honor roll certificates and other awards. They’ve taped up some of their artwork, too.

Tish says they keep the children indoors as much as possible, except for Kids Club, a once-a-week after-school program run by a local ministry at the complex. TV helps fill the time.

“I don’t want them to be with the other kids (in the project,) except the ones who live next door,” she said. “If they become friends with them, my kids will be on drugs.”

In fall 2015, Child Protective Services opened an investigation on the Bookers, after Mary told a friend at school her parents were “arguing.” She then told the social worker she was “afraid of her father,” Tish said.

It wasn’t the first time they’d been involved with CPS. About 12 years ago, in Beaumont, the state investigated them over allegations of possible physical abuse, Tish said. They ended up losing their children for a year, as they took part in parenting classes and other services.

“It was my fault,” Tish said. “I had gone off my meds.”

Toward the end of 2016 Tish said she and her spouse had done all the services CPS had required of them and the case had been closed.

All four children nurtured dreams of a brighter future. Mary, 15, wants to be a first-grade teacher. Cleo II, 16, wants to be a police officer. Carnelia, 13, wants to play professional basketball. Kelley, 10, has set her sights on nursing. Two of the kids take pills for ADHD; two take sleeping medication.

In the summer of 2015, Kelley had a birthday party. The family was out of food stamps, so she had to wait three days to celebrate — hot dogs, chips and cookies. Four of her friends from the complex attended. For the big finish, Tish produced a bag of Popsicles.

Before the party, Carnelia practiced her clarinet on the tiny back porch, which looked out on a trash-strewn grassy area and a clothesline hung with clothes. A small pile of empty Tall Boy beer cans sat pyramid-like in one corner.

Carnelia is an overachiever who belonged to the Junior Honor Society, participated in multiple schools sports and was on her school’s yearbook team. She said she is going to live far, far away from this place when she grows up.

“I’m going to have a mansion and a farm,” she said, then rattled off the names of five luxury cars she would own.

“Oh, wait,” she said. “Also a Lamborghini.”

mstoeltje@express-news.net

For Taylor Reeves, who got pregnant at 19 and had her second child two years ago, being a mother of two at 21 was difficult, but it was also a way to experience the affection she never got from the adults in her life, she said.

She’d spent her childhood years bouncing between divorced parents, residential treatment centers and foster care. She was jailed twice for fighting; she lost her virginity at 14, she said.

“I love my children more than anything,” Reeves said one afternoon in late summer 2015, as she prepared to leave Seton Home, a nonprofit organization that provides housing and other services to teen mothers. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for Delilah and Desmond,” her second child who was born that summer.

Reeves’ story is not atypical: Many teens who give birth come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Teen pregnancy is linked to generational poverty, experts say, and is implicated in many problems associated with it: higher rates of incarceration, less education, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence and child abuse, both among the teen parents themselves and their children.

In San Antonio, there were 2,441 births to girls ages 10 to 19 in San Antonio in 2014. The rate has declined 46 percent since 2000, but the city’s teen birth rate still remains 55 percent higher than the rest of the nation. The majority of teen births – 1,688 – occur among teens ages 18 to 19.

Among the teen mothers who gave birth in San Antonio in 2014, 539 – like Reeves - already had at least one child. According to the city’s Metro Health, teen childbearing costs the city at least $54.2 million a year in health costs and other expenses.

Source: San Antonio Metropolitan Health District

Bringing help to low-income children — one soul at a time

Kid’s Club seeks to buffer the detrimental effects of poverty on children at one public housing complex.

On a sweltering summer day, Pastor Marty Gaines and his wife, Imogene, headed toward a big yellow school bus, ready to go out and gather the day’s contingent of hearts and minds.

For seven years, the couple had run a free, faith-based after-school and summer program for the children who live at Cassiano Homes, an aging public housing complex on the West Side. Some 1,200 youths live in the apartments at any time; each year, about 500 of them take part in Kids Club. The program is ostensibly about tutoring and games and field trips, but the true purpose is to buffer the effects of poverty on Cassiano’s young residents, damage that studies show can be devastating and lifelong.

The Gaineses used to have a church on the North Side, where they and their congregants dabbled in helping the poor. They decided it wasn’t enough, so they went all in, moving their church to the West Side and dedicating themselves to being a daily presence in the lives of the children they seek to help.

“To really help poor people, it has to be long-term and it has to be relational,” Gaines said in the summer of 2015, before suffering a debilitating stroke that fall. (As he continues to recover, his son and daughter-in-law are running the program.) “That’s our strong conviction.”

Kids Club is Christian and the couple didn’t accept government funds so it could keep that focus. Gaines may be one of the few evangelical pastors in town who can talk about “plasticity” of the young brain, resiliency and “developmental assets.”

So many kids participate in the program it has to be done in shifts, by sections of the complex. This means children can join in only one day a week or less. Since many parents won’t see to it that their children show up on their allotted day, the couple went out and got them.

“Hey buddy!” Gaines said as a little boy ran up and all but threw himself at the pastor.

A wiry, energetic man with a neat salt-and-pepper beard, Gaines, 57, went door-to-door, gathering the flock. As he made his way through one section of the project, kids ran up to him for hugs, calling him “Pop-Pop.” He and Imogene made it a point to know the name of every child in the program. They also stopped to chat with parents, sometimes huddled conversations where they offer support and a listening ear.

Sometimes, they had to work with neighborhood schools and the authorities to report parents to Child Protective Services for suspected abuse and neglect. The ZIP code in which the complex is located routinely posts the highest number of confirmed cases in the city, about 400 a year.

One day, on the way to collect more of the day’s participants, the yellow school bus passed an unnerving scene — a cluster of police cars, lights blazing, surrounding a man in a bandanna, in the process of getting handcuffed. Gaines said such scenes aren’t uncommon at the housing project.

As the bus drove by, the children didn’t even turn their heads to look.

Inside the community room, things grew lively as the 50 or so children played silly games, such as trying to move a cookie from their foreheads to their mouths without using their hands. Laughter and shouts of joy ricocheted off the walls. The couple’s son and daughter-in-law, as well as two staff members, helped control the pandemonium.

Then the tone grew more serious. A young female staffer gave a short sermon on the Garden of Eden, illustrated with cartoons above her head, talking about how Adam and Eve broke God’s heart.

Then Gaines got up to drive the message home. How many of you have broken hearts, he asked? Hands went up around the room. He spoke of the pain a child might feel when an absent father, promising to show up for lunch, never materializes. As he spoke of the hurts some in his flock might have endured, his voice grew passionate, breaking at times.

“If the snake tells you you’re ugly or stupid or not good enough, it’s a lie!” he said, reaching his crescendo. “You are amazing, made in the image of God!”

Kids Club isn’t the only Christian nonprofit operating at Cassiano. A second one, Jireh House, provides a food pantry, clothing and Bible study for adults.

Richard Milk of the San Antonio Housing Authority, which manages Cassiano, said HUD rules don’t prohibit faith-based organizations from providing services at government-funded housing complexes, such as food, clothing and GED training. The policy extends to religious-oriented programming, he said.

“Resident participation in these activities is voluntary,” he said. “No one is required to participate.”

Both public schools in the area of Cassiano Homes — Sarah King Elementary and Rhodes Middle School — provide low-cost, after-school programs that are nonreligious in nature, but a district spokeswoman said she couldn’t provide the number of housing project children who might participate.

When the sermon was done, Gaines asked children who wanted a hug or a prayer to come forward. One by one they filed to the front, some as young as 6 or 7, many in tears. The prayers and hugs went on for some time.

Studies show children who grow up in poverty are more likely to experience severe stress, such as exposure to domestic violence or child abuse, loss of a parent, substandard housing and chaotic home lives.

This stress can have lifelong negative effects, such as higher risks for mental illness, substance abuse and other health problems. A new study showed poverty tends to be more harmful to boys than girls.

Poverty even can act as a neurotoxin — one study showed children in low-income families had smaller brain volume than those from richer homes. Early deprivation can lead to long-term cognitive and behavioral troubles. Kids in low-income families enter school already behind in vocabulary, knowing far fewer words than their better-off peers.

But programs like Kids Club help mitigate the damage, research shows. On a single afternoon inside the community center at Cassiano Homes, healing seemed to be happening.

“Remember we love every single one of you, and you’re going to change the world!” Gaines told the children, his face breaking out in a beatific smile. “I can’t be with you 24 hours a day, but God can!”

Then the children climbed back onto the bus to return to their perhaps troubled lives.

mstoeltje@express-news.net

Chapter II: The toll of low wages and little education

Even making above minimum wage doesn’t end the struggle for many families

Dana and Frank Simental sat around the table with two of their three kids on a fall evening in 2015, enjoying a McDonald’s dinner of chicken nuggets.

It was a happy atmosphere that belied the struggles the family had endured over the previous two years, after Frank lost his job and Dana worked herself to the bone for six months, juggling both full- and part-time jobs.

She was back to working just one job, a hospital position that paid $12.55 an hour — about $5 above the minimum wage. Simental also picked up overtime hours, but even with the extra cash, her annual income still skirted the federal poverty threshold, set at $28,440 for a family of five.

When people talk about poverty and the income gap in San Antonio, where almost 20 percent of residents never catch a glimpse of prosperity, two issues tend to emerge: the city’s chronic low education levels and the low-wage jobs that go along with that.

Fix those things, the argument goes, and poverty will take care of itself.

The Simentals’ story shows a common face of financial struggle in San Antonio. Without college degrees but with some training or skills, they get paid somewhat above the minimum wage but still have a hard time providing for their families.

The Simentals live in a modest, well-worn home that Dana’s grandfather built in a scruffy West Side neighborhood. Patches of the linoleum floor are coming up; the walls feature holes here and there. Other walls bear evidence of a sheet rock project that ground to a halt after the money ran out.

Dana and Frank both were raised by single mothers. Frank grew up at Alazan-Apache Courts, a housing project, where the family got by on public assistance. He used to work as a VIA bus driver, a job he held for more than a decade, earning twice the minimum wage. Dana stayed home with the kids, working as a night hotel auditor as each child entered grade school, earning medical field certificates at community college along the way.

Two years ago, it all came crashing down. Frank’s bus got T-boned by a semi-trailer truck, the jolt aggravating a prior work-related back injury. He tried to work for about a month but couldn’t take the pain.

After being out of the job beyond VIA’s work-related injury leave policy — 260 days — he was let go. His long-term disability pay stopped more than a year ago.

Her husband unable to work, Dana stepped up.

She’d already been working full-time at University Health System since 2009. Last year, she took on a second job, earning $9 an hour as a part-time cashier at Home Depot at night. She’d get off work at the hospital, rush home to have a quick meal with her children, then do her second job until midnight — even though the extra income cost her family their food stamps.

After six months, it got to be too much.

“It came with a big price,” Dana said, tears flowing down her cheeks. “My kids would say, ‘Mom, can you stay home tonight?’ and I was like, ‘No, I’ve got to work.’ And their faces would just fall. I just never saw them. It hurt.”

Recently, Dana received a promotion at work, which included a pay increase. Frank is back to working part-time, driving a shuttle. Still, life is hard.

“We live paycheck to paycheck, but have a very strong faith,” Dana said. “That’s what keeps us going.”

The income gap

Three things would make a huge dent in poverty in San Antonio, some experts say.

“Raise the minimum wage, expand access to early education and fully fund public education,” said Ann Beeson, executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin group that advocates for low-income Texans.

The heyday of coal, steel and middle-class manufacturing jobs is over, despite what politicians might promise, experts say. The technological and digital revolution has left many lacking the necessary skills to prosper. Too few students, especially those at two-year and for-profit colleges, leave with a degree or certificate, and many are burdened with significant debt, studies show.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised a massive infrastructure construction program, which ostensibly would put scores of Americans to work. But plans for it remain vague, and some experts doubt its economic feasibility, especially when coupled with Trump’s also-promised tax cuts.

Statewide, Texas was responsible for 41 percent of all job growth in the nation from 2000 to 2013, creating 2 million jobs, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. But it has the 10th highest rate of low-wage jobs in the country, with nearly one of three jobs in Texas paying less than $24,300 a year — the federal poverty line for a family of four.

In Texas, society isn’t adequately readying the next generation of workers, especially among the poor, Beeson said

“Because we aren’t doing enough to prepare kids for college or career, too many Texans are stuck in low-paying jobs,” she said.

In San Antonio, those jobs tend to cluster in the retail, service and tourism industries.

And when it comes to post-secondary education, there’s a divide: In Bexar County, 17.9 percent of Anglo residents have a bachelor’s degree in 2014, compared to 13.1 percent of African-Americans and 9.7 percent of Hispanics, according to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. An uneducated populace means high-skill industries often have to look elsewhere to find qualified employees, experts said.

“Having to import workers here from other places doesn’t bode well for the city of the future,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.

Like other growing cities, San Antonio has seen a rise in STEM-related industries — the acronym stands for science, technology, engineering and math; everyone agrees it’s the bellwether for future economic prosperity. But with only 45,210 workers — 4.9 percent of the total workforce — San Antonio has the lowest number of STEM employees of any major city in Texas, Bloomberg Business reports. Average annual pay for a STEM employee in San Antonio is $69,760, that analysis says.

By contrast, Austin boasts almost 98,000 STEM workers, or 11 percent of the total workforce. Houston has more than 230,000 STEM employees, or 8.3 percent of the total workforce. An educated populace is a big part of what lures STEM companies and other high-wage industries to a city, experts say. Absent that, they stay away.

Steve Glickman, head of the Economic Innovation Group in Washington, said San Antonio trails all other major cities in Texas when it comes to the rate of new business creation and start-ups.

“The rate is much lower than it should be,” he said. “San Antonio lags behind Houston, which created twice as many jobs and established more businesses. San Antonio trails not just Austin and Fort Worth, but even Corpus Christi and Laredo, in terms of percentage of business growth over the last four years. We don’t know the answer to that.”

To raise wages or not

Beeson said research overwhelmingly shows raising the minimum wage would “lift all boats” and would not lead to the catastrophic job loss and steep price increases envisioned by opponents. (The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 was set in 2009; Democrats in Washington tried to raise it to $10.10 last year, a move shot down by Republicans.)

Almost 30 states and dozens of cities now have minimum wages that exceed the federal level. In April, California and New York became the first states to raise the minimum wage to $15, to be slowly phased in over a period of years.

An analysis done by the CPPP in 2015 showed that if Texas raised the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, about 168,000 private or nonprofit workers in Bexar County, about 26.8 percent of that sector, would get a pay increase. Of those, 62 percent are in their prime working years. A little more than half live in households with children; 46 percent have at least some college. Almost 70 percent are Hispanic.

Various studies have found differences in what is considered a living wage. A CPPP study, for example, found that a single person in San Antonio would have to earn $12.86 an hour to meet basic living expenses. For a parent with one child, the required wage jumped to $20.21 an hour. Yet another study found a minimum-wage worker in Texas would have to work a whopping 73 hours a week to rent a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rate.

Two years ago, the city of San Antonio raised wages for its lowest paid workers, from $11.47 an hour to $13. At the higher pay, a full-time city worker now earns $27,040 a year — about $3,000 above the federal poverty threshold for a family of four.

The county raised wages for its workers to $13 an hour at the start of fiscal year 2016. It also raised wages for custodial workers who have contract jobs with the county, from the minimum wage to $9 an hour.

Wolff said it was about time.

“The American taxpayer is subsidizing low-wage employers, through things like food stamps,” he said. “People on minimum wage can barely get by. They can’t do right by their kids, their family.”

By law, the city has no authority to require higher wages for workers at private businesses, such as fast-food chains.

Not everyone was a fan of the city’s wage raise. Critics said the increase, with a price tag of $2.1 million in its first year, would have been better used to create new jobs and spur investment.

Some argue that raising the minimum wage would be detrimental to the very people it would purport to help, by reducing the amount of jobs available and raising prices. David A. MacPherson, chair of the economics department at Trinity University, said most minimum wage earners in San Antonio aren’t main bread winners in their household; raising the pay would likely put them out of work.

Those against raising the minimum wage tend to prefer the earned-income tax credit, already in existence, a tax policy lauded on both sides of the political aisle that basically provides an annual income tax refund for people who are among the working poor.

In Texas, the EITC puts money in the pockets of some 800,000 low-income workers a year.

But a lump sum at the end of the year may not help with the day-to-day costs of holding a job, such as child care, an issue that hobbles many low-income workers, especially women, Beeson said.

In San Antonio, the wait list for subsidized child care through Workforce Solutions Alamo, a 12-county workforce program that provides career counseling and other services, hovers around 4,000 families, said spokeswoman Eva Esquivel.

Falling behind

Claudia Martinez, 39, was another San Antonio resident who in fall 2015 held more than one full-time job and still felt threatened by financial instability.

Like Dana Simental, she worked at University Health System, in a medical lab at University Hospital. On the weekends, she also worked as a cashier at a nightclub from 8 p.m to 3 a.m. And she worked overtime in emergency care for UHS.

Martinez’ story includes another feature common to many who struggle at the low end of the wage scale — a prison record. Finding work can be hard, if not impossible, for those who’ve done time, a situation that has spawned a national “ban the box” movement, referring to the box on job applications that asks applicants to reveal past criminal history.

Martinez was arrested in 2001 after she tried to bring an undocumented family member from Mexico into the U.S. She received probation. During that time, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In 2003, she violated her probation by traveling to Mexico without approval — with a group of people who sold drugs.

“I got mixed up with the wrong crowd,” she said.

Martinez received a three-year prison sentence. Her mother was awarded custody of her four children.

Once out of prison, she was determined to fly right, she said. She earned several medical certificates at a local career college. She met a decent man, a roofer, who loved her kids. They were together almost 10 years, having a daughter of their own. Martinez got the job at UHS, earning $12 an hour. The good life finally had arrived.

Then, her common-law husband died of a heart attack. “I haven’t been able to grieve for him, because I’m just rush-rush-rushing all the time,” she said.

Five of her six children lived at their grandparents’ house; Martinez is close with them. “I don’t know what I would do without my mother,” she said.

She and her 7-year-old daughter lived with her mother-in-law. Even though she worked almost 80 hours a week, she said, by the end of the month she was out of money, what with her car payment and insurance, child support payments to her mother, cellphone plans for all the kids, groceries, medical bills.

But the hardest part is not seeing her kids enough, she said. Like Dana, she started to cry when she talked about it.

“They don’t listen to me,” she said. “It’s like I don’t exist to them, because I’m never around. They know why I work so much, but I think at the end the day what they want is for me to pay attention to them.”

Martinez tried to get a mortgage, so that she, her parents, her six kids and her new granddaughter could all live together, but the bank turned her down for bad credit.

Her mother, Lydia, who received disability payment as well as subsidized rent for the two-story brick house in which they live, worried about her daughter.

“I tell her she works too much, she needs to slow down,” she said. “She constantly thinks, ‘My kids need this, they need that,’ and I say, ‘Claudia, they have clothes, they have food.’ She thinks that whatever she does, it’s not enough.”

Three months ago, Martinez left her hospital job. She now works at a restaurant, making far less money.

“This economy has to change,” she said.

Stresses of the working poor

Mayor Ivy Taylor was “not a champion” of the wage increase for city workers, she said in an interview in 2015. Nor did she support the idea that raising the minimum wage is the way out of poverty and income inequality in San Antonio.

Education is the key.

“It’s the closest thing we have to a magic bullet,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been focusing on workforce development, especially for those past the K-12 time of their lives. People shouldn’t be stuck in dead-end jobs or underemployed. They need to use local opportunities at our community colleges, in apprenticeship programs, so they can move up the economic ladder.”

In fiscal year 2016, the city distributed more than $4.4 million to a dozen workforce-related agencies and programs, serving more than 5,200 participants. It’s on track to spend more than $4.6 million in fiscal year 2017.

During the debate over raising wages for city workers, Taylor said she discovered employees working at the lowest end of the wage scale had been in those same jobs “for an average of 10 to 15 years.”

“How can I be in the same job, that pays the same thing, for 25 years and expect to be able to meet my obligations?” she asked rhetorically. “I have to gain additional skills, gain more education. I don’t want those employees to feel their only option is to lobby the council and the community to raise their wages.”

Talk to those who actually work low-wage jobs (sometimes two or three) and the notion they must find time to improve their skills and education — on top of the already arduous daily task of simply keeping their families afloat — sounds unrealistic, if not a tad heartless.

That seemed to be the conclusion of some 100 medical and nursing students at the University of Texas Health Science Center, where one morning in 2015 they took part in a poverty simulation, basically a game that lets participants experience what it’s like to be working poor.

The simulation was set up in a large auditorium. Volunteers sat at stations around the perimeter that represented the various entities a working poor person might interact with — social services office, health clinic, utility office, bank, grocery store, school, job, payday lender, pawn shop.

The students sat in clusters of fours and fives. When the timer went off, they opened packets to find descriptions of their “ families” and what roles each would play. The packets included assets — TVs, microwaves — as well as bills, bus tokens and other items. At any time during the game, a family could be subjected to a crisis out of the blue — an illness, a relative arrested, a job loss.

“I’m 16 and pregnant,” one young female student observed, looking at her card.

“We need to decide what to pawn,” said a young man at her table. “How about the refrigerator?”

The buzzer starting the game went off. The month was divided into four 15-minute weeks, with brief time in between for the students to process and plan for the next week.

Things started out orderly and calm. The students waited patiently in line at the various stations — the pawn shop got backed up first — although many forgot the bus tokens required for any transaction.

By the end of morning, the students were running around frantically, cutting into line, jockeying for space. One single mother forgot her child in day care. Another family had been evicted from their home. Some students were reduced to stealing microwaves and bus tokens from others’ tables.

Afterward, a professor asked the students for their impressions.

“No matter how carefully I planned to allocate my money, I just didn’t have enough,” said a young woman. “I felt so helpless. There’s just no way I could move up.”

Wins of workforce training

Given how hard it can be to gain new skills as an adult, Taylor has put a focus on streamlining and aligning existing workforce development programs, to make it easier for “a disconnected 21-year-old who dropped out of high school at 16 to know where to go to re-enter the system,” she said.

Multiple agencies provide workforce training, including Alamo Academies, which sets its sights on high school sophomores, steering them toward careers in such fields as information technology, manufacturing, health care, aerospace and heavy equipment — in-demand jobs that don’t necessarily require a four-year college degree but pay good money and benefits. The program is free.

Partnering with Alamo Colleges, local industries and others, Alamo Academies enables the students to work toward a two-year associate’s degree and various certificates while still in high school. It places many in paid summer internships at participating businesses.

Graduates have found jobs at companies like Lockheed Martin and Holt Cat, earning an average salary of $42,000, with no college debt. By last fall, the academy has produced more than 1,200 graduates, 86 percent of whom are economically disadvantaged. More than three-quarters are minorities.

“We’re the answer to the workforce talent pipeline and solving the ‘skills gap,’” Director Gene Bowman said. Of the program’s graduates to date, 35 percent have obtained full-time employment or joined the military; 60 percent have gone on to college, he said. (The other 5 percent moved after graduating.)

But Alamo Academies in a sense has become the victim of its own success: Last year, there were 1,800 applicants for 255 spaces.

“We need more companies to get involved to provide opportunities for these motivated and prepared young men and women to enter into high-tech, high-paid STEM careers,” Bowman said.

Each year in San Antonio, more than 2,000 manufacturing jobs go begging because of a lack of skilled workers, city officials have said.

The need to expand is also a common refrain at Project Quest, a workforce program that provides training to adults. Each year, more than 1,000 participants go through the one-year to 18-month program, and some 300 graduate. Like Alamo Academies, Project Quest focuses on skilled and well-paying jobs in health care, STEM and IT fields.

As is often the case in the nonprofit world, money is the issue.

“We’ve never been funded to scale,” Executive Director Sister Pearl Ceasar said. Her agency receives about $2 million a year from the city, and another $2 million from other sources. “A thousand people is good, but to operate to scale we’d need to serve 5,000 to 6,000 adults a year. Some say we’re expensive, but look at the expense of not funding us.“

Child care and transportation are the two biggest barriers to adult employment, said Nancy Hard, CEO of Family Services, which provides an array of social services to some 90,000 poor and working poor clients a year. These issues are receiving new attention of late, and that’s good, she said, but existing programs often don’t address real-world problems.

“If you don’t have someone to take care of a sick child, even if you’re lucky enough to have subsidized child care, you’re not going to complete job training,” she said. “And if you don’t have the tools and resiliency to battle those challenges, it’s hard to make headway” out of poverty.

Another issue – too few nonprofits and government agencies take what Hard calls a “multigenerational approach,” where the parent’s needs are addressed at the same time as the child’s, and, quite possibly, the grandparent’s.

“We’re blessed in San Antonio with an abundance of resources, but so many programs are targeted either to the child or the adult, or to a specific program such as job training,” she said. “We need funding that has blending capacity, and right now we don’t have enough of that flexibilty.”

Students in crisis

All the focus on workforce development leads inevitably to the contentious question: Why aren’t public schools doing a better job preparing disadvantaged youths to enter the world of college?

On average, a college graduate will earn over a lifetime more than $1 million more than a high school drop-out, according to a study by the Georgetown University Center of Education.

Texas has one of the biggest gaps in the nation when it comes to bachelor degree completion rates of low-income versus higher-income students, studies show.

Critics point to a lack of resources, the basis for legal battles over unequal school funding that have been waged nationwide and in Texas for decades, with a resolution still seemingly far off. In Texas, deep cuts to funding for public schools has only exacerbated the problem, advocates say.

There has been progress nationwide in the past decade: The drop-out rate among Hispanics, for one, has gone down, while college enrollment has gone up, according to the Pew Research Center.

In San Antonio, the high school dropout rate dropped from 20.5 percent to 18.5 percent, according to the most recent census data. More than 80 percent of the population age 25 years and older graduated from high school. Of those, 25 percent went on to earn a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Still, San Antonio’s education level is lower than the state or nation as a whole. In Texas, 27.6 percent of people 25 or older earned bachelor’s or higher degrees. In the U.S., 29.7 percent of people 25 or older earned such degrees.

Even so, things at the state level are hardly rosy: In Texas, only 15 percent of students who enroll in community college will end up graduating from a four-year college or university — slightly higher than the national average but still too low, according to Lumina Foundation, an advocacy group.

Not only are some Texas students not graduating; many enter the school system more disadvantaged than in decades past. In the early 1990s, fewer than 32 percent of Texas public school students were low-income. The ratio has switched — today 60 percent are economically disadvantaged.

“These are the future workers of our state,” said Chandra Villanueva, an analyst with CPPP. “We’re adding 85,000 students a year to our system, and almost all of them are poor.”

A CPPP study last year found about 27 percent of children in Bexar County live in poverty, a condition that falls harder on Hispanic and African-American families.

Hispanic students in the county are more than seven times more likely to be enrolled in high-poverty school districts than their Anglo peers. Those districts are more likely to have higher teacher turnover rates and teachers with less experience.

Low-income students also start out behind the eight ball, Villanueva said. According to one 2013 analysis, 74 percent of low-income students in Bexar County aren’t reading at grade level by third-grade.

Educators say they fight an uphill battle, struggling to meet the needs of children who land in classrooms beset by a host of emotional and learning issues, often stemming from problems at home — addicted parents, domestic violence, substandard housing and other forms of instability linked to poverty and economic distress.

In one national poll, educators labeled home dysfunction as the “elephant in living room” when it comes to root causes of disparities. When asked for possible solutions, the teachers voted for more funding — not for technology or accountability or testing, but for nurse home-visiting programs, early learning initiatives and other anti-poverty measures.

In San Antonio, a raft of nonprofit programs seeks to mitigate the negative effects of poverty on children. And last year, the city received a grant to expand and improve Head Start and Early Head Start programs at five participating child care centers. Former Mayor Julián Castro’s signature preschool program, Pre-K 4 SA, seeks to level the scholastic playing field for thousands of kids before they even make it to kindergarten.

Last year, the program served about 2,000 4-year-olds at four centers across the city.

Again, the problem is one of scale, said advocates of the poor.

‘Adrift in winds of change’

Jason Olivo’s story illustrates another type of struggle in San Antonio — people who are able to attain a stable, middle-class lifestyle, only to see it knocked down by larger economic forces beyond their control.

An honors graduate of John Jay High School, Olivo, 36, lacks a college degree but over the years has learned an array of skills, the offshoot of moving around to different jobs as economic downturns buffeted him this way and that.

He started out, as many do, earning hourly wages at low-skill jobs. By 2000, he’d entered the so-called “call center circuit,” ending up at insurance behemoth USAA, making $15.75 an hour helping customers of the banking division.

“This is the first place I noticed market forces were beginning to impact me,” he said. “The CEO decided it was time to streamline, and one of the jobs liquidated was mine. I’m not bashing or insulting any of the companies I worked for — I completely understand it’s just a business decision. But unfortunately I got caught up in that.”

After USAA, Olivo worked at other calls centers and at positions found through various temp agencies — jobs that paid the bills but offered little in the way of stability, he said.

In 2004, he went to work for a cable company, installing equipment. He loved the work but within a year suffered a work-related injury and quit. By 2006, Olivo, now the father of a 1-year-old son with autism, had scored a job in the home mortgage business at World Savings Bank.

The housing industry was booming, but when that bubble burst in 2008, Olivo’s $31,000-a-year job went with it. His company wasn’t one of those banks that had sold unstable signature loans, he said, but after the bank was sold to another financial institution, he and many other co-workers were laid off.

“When you have a kid, especially one with special needs, it’s just terrifying,” said Olivo, who split from his son’s mother just as the mortgage industry was imploding.

Back to temp agencies he went. Olivo worked in customer service for a different cable company, making about $11 an hour. “I wanted to be able to earn more income, but if you don’t have a certain skill set, you’re adrift in the winds of change,” he said.

He worked at the IRS, a temporary job that paid $13.75 an hour. By 2009, Olivo was back to earning $30,000 a year at Galveston-based insurance company. Three years later, the company decided to close its San Antonio satellite offices and he was out of work yet again.

He was hired at an insurance company call center, but quit after a year when the work culture began placing quantity of calls over quality of service provided, he said. Then came a $31,000-a-year job at a financial company, where Olivo oversaw a department that handled tax liens. He loved it, but left after media reports began describing the industry as “predatory,” even thought Olivo insisted his company didn’t indulge in such practices.

Finally, an out-of-work Olivo decided to acquire a set of skills “no one could take away from me.” He enrolled in the Open Cloud Academy, taking an eight-week course to become an entry-level network engineer. Since he hadn’t worked for 24 weeks, Project Quest paid the course’s $3,500 fee.

Since graduating in July, Olivo has been trying to find a job in the technology field — a requirement of the grant he received to pay for the academy. He’s gone through most of his savings and said if it weren’t for the help of his girlfriend, with whom he lives, and his family, he doesn’t know what he would have done.

Since he’s behind on child support payments, Olivo is mandated by a court to do 15 in-person job interviews a week. Work Force Solutions Alamo is helping him with that, but it’s hard to secure personal interviews, he said, much less an actual job.

“When you go (to the company), they tell you to apply online,” he said.

It doesn’t help that many of his academy peers — his competition — are a decade or more younger than him. Still, Olivo tried to stay positive and doesn’t bear any of his former employers ill will.

In November, Olivo was hired by CGI, a firm that consults and contracts with the federal government. It’s an entry-level position that “will give me the foundational experience that I need in order to secure a higher-paying job down the road,” he said.

mstoeltje@express-news.net

Chapter III: Housing woes play large role in economic struggle

From rising rents to a lack of affordable housing, low-income families often struggle to find decent shelter.

In spring 2014, Lisa de los Santos and daughter Cassie had no idea their lives were about to become entwined with the battle over gentrification in San Antonio.

They’d been living for years at Mission Trails Mobile Home Park on the South Side near the San Antonio River’s Mission Reach, an area that just recently drew developers’ interest.

The almost 300 residents, many of whom were buying their mobile homes through rent-to-own contracts, were told they had to move in order to make way for a planned $75 million high-end apartment complex.

Angry residents took to the microphone at community meetings, decrying the efforts of city leaders to rezone the neighborhood to make way for the fancy new housing. They lost.

“The hardest part was losing touch with people we’d known for years,” said Lisa, sitting inside her mobile home, now located in an aging mobile home park down a potholed street near Floresville, far from her previous environs.

Finding decent affordable housing compounds the problems faced by people with low incomes, experts say. Not only do housing costs often eat up the money needed to survive, many children grow up in substandard housing that is surrounded by low-performing schools, high crime rates and little opportunity to move up in the world.

City leaders just now are coming to grips with a dire shortage of affordable housing in San Antonio, a problem that unfolds just as Mission Trails-style gentrification is seeping into once-blighted neighborhoods rendered newly hip by urban-loving millennials and well-heeled retirees.

This process is taking place mostly in and around downtown, in older neighborhoods such as those on East Side, where gentrification started even before an ambitious anti-poverty program that seeks to transform part of the area took root.

Redevelopment of rundown neighborhoods generally is good, but not if it tears apart the fabric of a place that has been generations in the making, say advocates for displaced residents. That group usually includes low-income African-American and Hispanic renters who get priced out and have few other housing options, plus long-time homeowners who find themselves stuck with higher property taxes.

Stung by the public relations debacle that was Mission Trails, the city convened a task force that sought to preserve “dynamic and diverse neighborhoods,” including how to proceed more thoughtfully regarding gentrification as revitalization of the urban core continues apace, and to examine other housing issues of the poor and low-income.

That committee came up with a set of recommendations, one of which was the formation of yet another committee, the San Antonio Housing Commission, whose job it is to study the ideas of the task force, put them into action or come up with better ones.

The commission produced data showing the affordable housing crisis in San Antonio, where need outpaces availability, especially for poor and working-poor people, and where the median price for new single-family homes in the metro area last year rose to more than $220,000.

The city already has dozens of housing-related programs, such as tax credit incentives and block grants. For the first time ever, at the behest of the commission, the city plans to put before voters in May a bond request that would direct $20 million to pave the way for affordable housing in different areas of the city.

The goal of the commission is to buffer the negative effects of gentrification while simultaneously creating more affordable housng for low-income people.

“The biggest piece is trying preserve diverse communities,” said Jennifer Gonzalez, who is head of the commission and of Alamo Community Group, an affordable housing group that provides wrap-around social services to residents. “Hopefully the goal is to create policies that let residents stay in place as neighborhoods continue to change.”

Large forces at play

A number of large, systemic forces, both past and present, involving housing policy and politics have served to perpetuate poverty, whether intentionally or not, advocates say.

Some of these forces stretch back decades, such as redlining, a practice in which banks refused to give loans to those living in minority neighborhoods, and restrictive covenants, which kept certain populations, mostly African-Americans and Hispanics, out of favorable areas.

In San Antonio and elsewhere, public housing projects were constructed decades ago on less desirable sides of town, in effect sequestering low-income residents in areas with few of the resources the affluent take for granted — high-performing schools, safe streets, access to high-paying jobs and other necessities.

More recently, developers throughout Texas have served to perpetuate housing discrimination by building their partly government-funded low-cost apartments in high-poverty areas, essentially dooming residents to lives surrounded by blight — a practice that was particularly egregious in the Alamo City, a San Antonio Express-News investigation in 2012 showed.

Another more recent factor: The housing boom and bust of 2008 hit minority homeowners the hardest, according to the Urban Institute.

Factor in the vagaries of public housing, programs that provide assistance to millions nationwide but too often come up short.

In San Antonio, more than 35,000 people languish on waiting lists for public housing programs at any one time, with wait times that can range from two months to seven years, depending on the program, said officials with the San Antonio Housing Authority.

Low wages make it hard for some people to obtain adequate housing. But while the income gap is important, another major problem underlying residential segregation is the “wealth gap,” which at core is a housing issue, said John Henneberger of the Austin-based Texas Low Income Housing Information Service.

Wealth is different from income, he said.

“For many Americans, the majority of their wealth is tied up in their homes, in their equity,” he said. “This is the wealth that provides a cushion should a crisis arise — a job loss, an illness — and it’s what stops families from falling into the lower class. And the intergenerational transfer of wealth through home ownership is the way economic security is passed down.”

Homes in some low-income neighborhoods tend to be surrounded by the kind of development that affluent residents never would tolerate — sewage treatments plants, interstates, maintenance yards. The cumulative effect over time means the houses don’t appreciate in value.

Another larger economic pattern that underlies persistent housing woes among the poor, say experts: Wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of renting, the most common form of low-income housing.

In every state except North Dakota, median rents have grown faster than median household incomes since before the Great Recession, the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports.

At the same time, federal rent assistance has not addressed this growing gap. Nationwide, only one of four households eligible for federal rental assistance gets it, due to funding limitations, said Barbara Sard, vice president for housing policy at the center.

“There’s good evidence that rental assistance prevents homelessness and housing instability, and one consequence of that gap in the availability of rental assistance is we have an almost flat level of homelessness, despite the improving economy,” she said.

In San Antonio, a handful of nonprofits address the homelessness issue, such as SAMMinistries, which provided rent and utility assistance to more than 3,600 people last year, as well as transitional, permanent and rapid-rehousing services to another 1,700. At Haven for Hope, the city’s $100 million homelessness center, more than 3,200 clients have been placed in permanent housing since its opening in 2010.

But rising costs create an uphill battle. In San Antonio, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment was $856 in 2016, well above the $377 most low-income renters can afford in monthly rent and utilities. (That’s using full-time, minimum wage work — in Texas, $7.25 an hour — as the basis.) The cost of rent in San Antonio rose more sharply from 2011-2015 than it did in Texas or nationwide, partly because of an influx of renters, according to the latest census data.

Housing is deemed “affordable” when a household’s rent or mortgage, coupled with utilities, make up 30 percent or less of monthly income.

Housing slots

The housing commission studied San Antonio’s demographics across the spectrum, using 2013 data to slot households into one of six different categories — extremely low, very low, low, moderate, upper and high income.

At the lowest level, yearly household earnings are about $13,000 or less. More than 79,000 households fall into this category; a whopping 83.7 percent are considered “cost burdened,” meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income toward rent.

Most of this population — 70 percent — are renters or those who live in public housing, shelters or with family or friends, often in overcrowded or substandard properties in or near downtown.

The situation is about as grim for the other low-income groups, which, when added up, represent almost 210,000 households, the largest category in San Antonio.

The analysis found San Antonio required more than 153,000 new affordable housing units for low-income residents by the end of this year — a goal that’s still far away, one city official acknowledged.

By contrast, the unmet housing need for high income households — categorized as annual incomes of $54,867 or above — is less than 3,000 units.

People living in poverty are more likely to move frequently because of housing instability, especially evictions, an issue that can weigh heavily on their children, said Judy McCormick, executive director of P 16 Plus, a data-driven collaborative focused on education in Bexar County.

In low-wealth school districts such as Edgewood, where about 98 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, more than 24 percent of the student body will switch districts during the school year, she said.

By contrast, in the more affluent North Side district, where 52 percent of students are low-income, the “mobility” rate is only 18 percent.

Moving frequently means children have to start over at a different school, with all that implies, she said — adjusting to new friends, teachers, surroundings, and possibly starting over at a new place in a textbook or curriculum.

“These kids have a lot of stress in their lives already, and moving frequently just adds more stress, more distraction,” McCormick said. “If you’re moving that much, you can start missing those milestones, such as reading by the third grade, which is so important for a student’s chances of graduating high school.”

Homeownership is one way out of that instability, but for far too many people in San Antonio, that goal remains a distant dream, said Rachel Griffith, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity in San Antonio.

In the past 40 years, her nonprofit has helped almost 1,000 low-income clients use “sweat equity” to build their way into a new home, the average monthly mortgage for which is around $510, on a 20-year, zero-interest mortgage — less than rent in many places.

Griffith said she’s seen the benefits of homeownershp ripple out into all aspects of families’ lives, breaking the cycle of poverty.

“One thing holding (Habitat) back, though, is funding,” she said. “Thousands of families every year have this need, but we’re only able to serve 45 to 55. It’s painful.”

Griffith, who also serves on the housing commission, said the $20 million affordable housing bond is a good start, but it’s not enough.

“The city could put its entire $800 million bond toward affordable housing and it still wouldn’t be enough, the crisis is so great,” she said. “But this at least begins the dialogue.”

Tenuous support

Lisa de los Santos, 51, and daughter Cassie, 27, know what it’s like to scramble to keep a roof over their heads and those of their children.

Lisa, who has worked at the same hydraulics company for 20 years, makes $28,600 a year to support herself and her 15-year-old son. Cassie earns $7 to $9 an hour — depending on how many of her co-workers show up — at a janitorial job cleaning bathrooms at a 13-story downtown bank, a wage she supplements by providing home health care to clients one or two days a week.

“We both live paycheck to paycheck,” Lisa said in summer 2015 as she chopped up watermelon for her grandchildren.

The two have a tenuous system that works, as long as no one gets sick: Lisa watches Cassie’s kids at night, while she works the graveyard shift at the bank. Cassie watches the kids during the day, when she’s not sleeping.

Their story contains elements common to many of the working poor: Cassie had her first baby at 16, after which she dropped out of high school. Lisa fled a marriage marred by domestic violence.

The father of Cassie’s children works at jobs that pay under the table, so his money can’t be garnished for child support. Cassie receives food stamp assistance, but not as much as a girlfriend who doesn’t have a job, which to her looks like the government penalizing people for working.

Even with the disruption of leaving Mission Trails, Lisa said she and her daughter consider themselves fortunate.

“We were the lucky ones,” she said, glancing around her living room, decorated with Native American tchotchkes. “Some people’s trailers were so old and dilapidated they would have fallen apart if you tried to move them.”

The housing task force came up with a host of recommendations, such as rules that notify residents of impending zoning changes, changes to the way block grants and waiver fees are used and new policies that would restrict rental costs for low-income tenants. So far, only the notification rule has been implemented.

Some critics, like activist Maria Berriozabal, have said the task force process was rushed and didn’t truly examine the larger issue of gentrification and how to keep longtime residents from being forced from their homes, among other problems.

Mayor Ivy Taylor has said that while she didn’t want to dismiss the pain of what occurred at Mission Trails, some of the concerns voiced over the dangers posed by gentrification during the controversy were “a little exaggerated.”

“We don’t want displacement, but the task force showed there is actually little risk of that for homeowners, based on the level of market activity we have right now” in gentrifying areas, she said. “People aren’t being displaced because they can’t pay their (property) taxes. The ones who are more at risk are renters, and we’re developing some policies that might address that.”

Laura McKieran of the UT Health School of Public Health San Antonio Regional Campus and director of Community Information Now begged to differ, referencing county records that show foreclosures linked to nonpayment of property taxes “are overwhelmingly confined to older, central-city neighborhoods that also have concentrated poverty.”

Whether or not a straight line can be drawn from gentrification to tax foreclosures, Taylor, an urban planner who represented the East Side on the City Council before becoming mayor, said the notion that poor sides of town don’t want development is “ridiculous.”

During her stint on the council, “we would beg developers, saying, ‘Please come build something new in our neighborhood,’” said Taylor, who lives in Dignowity Hill, a gentrifying part of the East Side where a refurbished mansion now goes for as high as $400,000 and two-bedroom fixer-upper bungalows can fetch $200,000.

Those growing up in Dignowity Hill likely can’t afford those prices, Taylor acknowledged.

The question of whether gentrification truly hurts or helps neighborhoods is far from settled: Some studies show the risk of displacement actually is quite low. Others show gentrification is relatively rare, affecting only a small number of those who live in high-poverty neighborhoods.

The far more common problem is how poverty persists in poor neighborhoods, some experts say, and how once low-poverty neighborhoods in cities across the nation have slipped into poverty since 1970.

In the past four decades, for every high-poverty neighborhood transformed by gentrification, 12 previously low-poverty neighborhoods have seen their poverty rates zoom up, according to a study by the City Observatory, an urban think tank.

Mixing poor, well-off

The benefit of mixed-income properties and neighborhoods is a common mantra among those who would fight poverty through the enlightened use of housing policy.

The theory is that by mixing different levels of housing affordability in the same neighborhood, the affluent live cheek-by-jowl with the poor, the latter benefiting from those things well-off neighborhoods automatically provide.

Whether mixed-income development actually works as a panacea to poverty is up for debate: A researcher at Case Western Reserve University, who did a five-year study of a $3.2 billion, 15-year mixed-income project in a poor public housing section of Chicago, found the program did little to change the actual lives of impoverished residents.

Part of the problem, he concluded, was that the project wasn’t broad enough, failing to address issues like workforce development and public education. And no one really knows the magic formula: What ratio of affluent-to-poor works best?

Local efforts to promote mixed-income development aim to avoid that mistake, said officials at the San Antonio Housing Authority, which jumped on the mixed-income bandwagon before the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced last July that cities must identify and remedy existing discriminatory housing practices or lose federal funding.

“We’re not just talking about prohibiting discrimination, but taking steps to overcome historical patterns of segregation,” said Richard Milk, SAHA’s director of policy and planning.

The city and county already are working together to come up with a joint plan, using data and tools provided by HUD, to reduce economic segregation, he said.

Milk said the joint plan likely would be completed this year.

“We’re looking not just at housing but at employment, public transportation, education,” he said. “All those issues are interrelated.”

How the administration of President-elect Donald Trump might affect this HUD-prompted effort — perhaps leveling it — remains to be determined, experts say.

Inside the Promise Zone, the city’s premier anti-poverty project on the East Side that has received more than $50 million in federal grants and millions more in additional funding, mixed-income housing is a cornerstone. But the scope of change encompasses far more, with programs addressing the area’s dire need for high-quality early childhood education, improved schools, access to workforce training and so on.

The focus is especially intense in EastPoint, the 4-square-mile area where the three federal grants overlap. While preliminary statistics are positive — the graduation rate is up at Sam Houston High School, for example, and more children are receiving high-quality pre-K education — the verdict on the project’s success is by no means final as the grants draw to a close.

Efforts to sustain the progress that has been achieved made will be key, officials said.

Other help is arriving from the outside: LISC, a national nonprofit that helps build sustainable communities by delivering financial and technical assistance to struggling urban neighborhoods, opened an office here in June.

LISC focuses on producing and preserving affordable housing as well as cultivating living-wage jobs and community businesses, as well as promoting education, safety and health, said Calvin Parker, head of the local office.

“As San Antonio continues to grow, and development pressures continue to mount, it will be critical to increase the supply of affordable housing and to preserve and solidify existing neighborhoods,” he said.

Crumbling properties

Advocates for the poor in San Antonio said one problem is a lack of adequate funds to help low-income homeowners fix their crumbling properties.

Code officials cite them for not repairing their homes — fines the homeowners can’t pay — and then spend thousands to demolish derelict structures, money that could have been better used helping the homeowners fix their homes.

“Compared to other cities, we don’t have a big nonprofit assisted housing sector,” McKieran said. “The majority of help is available through SAHA and the county, and that funding is limited.”

In one sense, there’s no lack of affordable housing in the city, said Adrian Lopez, SAHA’s director of community development initiatives.

“The problem is a lack of affordable housing that isn’t also dilapidated, unsanitary or plagued with major problems, such as with the roofing or electrical systems,” he said.

The affordable housing bond that will go before voters in May doesn’t include funding for housing rehabilitation, to the consternation of commuity groups like COPS/Metro.

But SAHA is trying to help its clients in ways that expand beyond housing, Lopez said. Six years ago, it was selected as one of 39 housing agencies nationwide to participate in “Move to Work,” an initiative that gives housing authorities leeway to implement programs that push clients toward self-sufficiency through education, job-training and other services.

“We’re trying to move the needle in the right direction,” Lopez said.

SAHA currently provides housing assistance to more than 65,000 people a year in San Antonio, either at one of 70 public housing properties it manages, through more than 13,000 rental vouchers — clients receive subsidies to rent from private landlords — or at one of 46 mixed-income properties the agency oversees in partnership with various nonprofit groups.

Those who participate in SAHA housing pay 30 percent of their income toward their housing costs. The goal is to ultimately move people off public housing, Lopez said.

But federal rental assistance programs too often keep families mired in high-poverty neighborhoods, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

In 2010, only 15 percent of children nationwide whose families received HUD rent subsidies lived in low-poverty neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of residents had income below the poverty line.

Even the housing voucher program, which provides recipients more flexibility, since they can pick from an array of private properties, often falls short: About 280,000 children in that program nationwide continued to live in high-poverty neighborhoods in 2014, the study found.

A 2015 Harvard study found that children living in high-poverty areas whose parents moved to more affluent neighborhoods showed significant improvement across a range of measures, compared to a control group — but only if the move happened before they turned 13.

Housing and transportation costs together make up the bulk of most family budgets, studies show.

For low-income people, this often involves public transportation, usually the VIA bus system. And this, in many cases, means simple trips can get complicated – long waits at the bus stop, multiple transfers, added hours of travel time.

For Llania Avila, a recovered heroin addict, what should have been a 15-minute trip from her West Side apartment to the methadone clinic next to Haven for Hope would take more than an hour. In the fall of 2015, she placed 14-month-old son Eddie in his stroller before dawn to make the trip that would keep her heroin withdrawal at bay. “I have to stand by the mailboxes, so the bus driver can see me in the dark,” she said.

Elizabeth Lutz with the Bexar County Health Collaborative said that for many low-income people, the frustrations involved in public transportation often means many don’t visit the doctor early on, seeking medical care only when their diseases worsens.

“The priority is just making ends meet,” she said.

Avila faithfully showed up for her methadone treatments, just as she had completed requirements of Child Protective Services when Eddie tested positive for drugs at birth. But by the fall of 2016, her son had been taken from her and placed with his aunt, after suspicious bruising was found on his face.

“He slipped trying to get a candy cane,” Avila said.

Fixed-income housing

Housing needs can be especially dire among the elderly living on fixed incomes.

Dorothy Mondine’s modest, white clapboard house sits not far from the Alamodome, whose ballyhooed opening in 1993 was supposed to spur economic development on the long-neglected East Side, bringing hope and new prosperity to the area’s beleaguered, mostly low-income, mostly African-American residents.

Those dreams largely fell flat.

Now EastPoint, the city’s flagship anti-poverty program, hopes to finally deliver on that dream.

Dozens of partners — the city, the county, nonprofit groups, government agencies, private investors — have come together in an ambitious plan to transform the East Side through a host of programs that address virtually every aspect of poverty.

Whether these measures will dramatically alter life on the East Side, which already was seeing gentrification before the empowerment zone program began, remains to be seen.

But Mondine, 84, seems to have fallen through the safety net, at least when it comes to the precarious state of her housing.

The roof on her house, a stone’s throw from the sleek townhomes and renovated bungalows of gentrification, leaked for seven years, she said. Her kitchen floor had several holes; sometimes she’d turn on the lights to find a possum brazenly perched on the kitchen counter.

Another possum (or maybe it was the same one) sometimes would sleep behind her bed.

On a morning in summer 2015, a group of teenagers from a church youth ministry in Katy scraped the rust off the metal fence in her front yard. Other teens worked to turn a back porch into a laundry room for a washer and dryer someone recently gave Mondine.

This same youth group had tackled multiple maintenance projects at her aging abode before. On this day, Mondine said she was dealing with a roach problem. In the bathroom, a small roach skittered across the wall. The old claw-foot bathtub held several inches of water, in which the bodies of many small roaches floated.

While Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (which is federally funded, not paid for through wages) has dramatically lifted the elderly out of poverty, the poverty rate for African-American and Hispanic seniors still is significantly higher than it is for older Anglos.

And the number of women 65 and older living in extreme poverty jumped by 18 percent in 2012, after having been steady for the previous decade, according to the National Women’s Law Center.

Mondine worked for most of her life, first as a child picking cotton in Lockhart. In between raising nine children, four of whom have died, she worked in the kitchen at Luby’s for 15 years, including after her husband left her for another woman.

After a car wreck hurt her back, preventing her from doing kitchen work, she took care of several disabled clients in their homes.

Paid low wages her whole life, Mondine barely made ends meet but she was able to buy her home for $10,000, paying $77 a month for 18 years. She’s lived here for 42 years, during which time her home has been broken into four times. But she loves her little home, she said, its living room decorated with so many photos and knickknacks and memorabilia that it looks like a gift box has exploded.

At the center of the room — and Mondine’s life — is an old, much-used Bible, lying open on the table, its lines highlighted in places, the margins filled with scribbles. An avid churchgoer, Mondine, who walks with a cane and has little kidney function due to damage from a diabetes medication, also is a prayer warrior.

Throughout a summer morning, the phone rang at regular intervals, with friends from her church, acquaintances and even total strangers calling, asking for her intercession. Each time, Mondine would struggle up out of her chair and walk to the phone.

The living room was warm, the only relief provided by a faint stream of air from a box fan. Mondine uses her wall-unit air conditioner only sporadically, to save on utilities.

She has very little money left each month after groceries, utilities, insurance and medicine; what’s left goes into the church collection plate. The government had been giving her $26 a month in food stamps, but for some reason it stopped that.

“It’s OK, people bring you food,” she said. “I don’t have but $10 in my bank account, but my life has so much richness to it, so I can give to others.”

The phone rang again. Mondine once again struggled up out of her chair, walked to the phone and then got down on her knees, plunging into prayer.

“Oh, Father God, Oh Lord Jesus, please hear us. …”

mstoeltje@express-news.net

Chapter IV: Two approaches to fighting poverty

One helps move poor people to affluent neighborhoods; another brings affluence to crumbling urban cores.

ALLEN — When single mother Heather Brown attended a Dallas Housing Authority orientation to learn how to use her new Section 8 housing voucher — a federal program that lets people with low incomes rent from private landlords — she heard something that intrigued her.

A speaker described a program that helps voucher recipients, most of them minorities, move from high-poverty neighborhoods to suburbs that surround Dallas, where good schools, safe streets and job opportunities abound.

The assistance included money for a security deposit as well as help in finding a willing landlord — not always an easy task in affluent, predominantly Anglo areas, where folks tend to look down on subsidized housing.

The vouchers themselves would carry higher dollar values, thanks to a program that calculates subsidy amounts based on ZIP code, instead of a citywide average. All voucher holders had to do was take the plunge.

“I was a little hesitant,” Brown, who’s African-American, said on an afternoon last year as she watched three of her young children gambol in the backyard of her modest brick home.

It sits in this tree-lined suburb where the grass definitely is greener than at the graffiti-marred apartment complex she left behind in North Dallas.

“Moving here entailed getting out of my comfort zone, but I wanted something different for my kids,” she said. “A chance for something better.”

But two solutions that have garnered a lot of attention seek to fight poverty by addressing where people live — but from polar opposite approaches. One method helps move low-income people to affluent areas. The other brings the fruits of affluence to poor neighborhoods.

San Antonio currently has placed most of its bets on the second approach. It’s called the Promise Zone, a neighborhood revitalization effort where three massive federal grants aim to fight poverty on the East Side by bringing a wide range of resources — affordable housing, job training, improved education and more — to a historically neglected side of town.

The first approach can be found a five-hour drive up Interstate 35, at a Dallas nonprofit called Inclusive Communities Project, or ICP.

ICP has been at the forefront of tackling housing segregation for more than a decade, not only by helping more than 3,000 voucher-holding families move to better living environments, but by attacking the very practices that served to concentrate the poor in blighted neighborhoods in the first place.

It has accomplished this largely through lawsuits, or threat of lawsuits.

A major one filed in 2008 prompted Texas four years ago to stop awarding lucrative tax credits to developers who planned to build their low-income housing properties in high-poverty areas. ICP argued such practices were discriminatory, because they had a disproportionate impact on low-income people.

Another lawsuit in 2010 created that voucher-subsidy pilot that enabled Brown to move to a more expensive area.

The 2008 lawsuit recently was dismissed, on grounds ICP failed to provide evidence that Texas’ decisions created a disparate impact in its tax credit program. But it doesn’t really matter, said ICP officials: The petition made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided housing policies can violate the Fair Housing Act, even if the intent wasn’t purposefully discriminatory.

Other legal actions have served to strong-arm prosperous suburbs around Dallas into accepting the kind of government-funded housing (and tenants) that typically become the target of vociferous, not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, opposition.

ICP’s bedrock belief is that segregation remains the root cause of poverty in America, and that ending housing discrimination — and the social ills that spring from it — is the premier civil rights cause of our time.

“What we saw in Ferguson, in Baltimore is the cauldron of segregation and all the damage it has done and continues to do,” said attorney Elizabeth K. Julian, president of ICP, referring to race-related upheavals over police violence in those cities. “Housing is not just about shelter. It’s the lynchpin of our failure to integrate society.”

A different approach

With its focus on helping minorities move into so-called “high-opportunity areas,” ICP’s approach, mirrored by a small number of other groups nationwide, represents the philosophical opposite of the anti-poverty paradigm currently being embraced by San Antonio’s civic leaders.

This would be the 22-square-mile Promise Zone — or, more specifically, EastPoint, a 4-square-mile area within the zone where the three large federal grants overlap.

Instead of trying to move residents out of the chronically impoverished, historically black East Side and into other parts of the city where resources already are abundant, the Promise Zone instead focuses on bringing said resources to residents — it’s a “place-based” initiative.

Kicked off in 2014 when President Barack Obama declared the area a “Promise Zone” — a designation that conferred advantages when applying for grants but no money itself — the effort is wide in scope, addressing everything from mixed-income housing and workforce training to early childhood education and public safety, and more.

East Meadows, a sleek, 215-unit complex built on the site of a former derelict public housing project that represents the first phase of a massive affordable housing program, had its grand unveiling in October. Ground was broken soon after on a new $5 million health clinic, followed by the announcement of multipurpose, one-stop education and job training center.

As the three grants draw to a close, officials and advocates who’ve midwifed the zone into existence grapple with ways to keep the progress moving forward.

The Promise Zone is the latest iteration of the “neighborhood revitalization” model of poverty reduction, a decades-old approach with a checkered track record. Julian quips that city hall book shelves across the nation are full of bound volumes detailing the fevered plans of revitalizationists — promises that too often fell flat.

She isn’t opposed to revitalization when done right, she said — and low-income housing advocates tend to agree the broad-based approach typified by the Promise Zone, where money goes not just to brick-and-mortar projects but to the real-life needs of people, is the way to go.

“There just needs to be a balance” between revitalization and efforts to integrate poor people into higher-income areas, Julian said.

Mike Etienne, a city employee who oversees EastPoint, believes the best approach is to “improve the quality of life for people where they live, connect them to jobs, give them better schools, safe neighborhoods, the things we all want, instead of moving them to other areas. Residents don’t want that.”

He acknowledges such transformation takes time.

“It’s not going to happen overnight,” he said. “It may take 10 or 15 years to reach fruition.”

The ICP and Promise Zone pursue their differing ends during a time of hope that housing policy can be used to combat poverty, an idea that got its start in 1968, when lawmakers passed the Fair Housing Act, which was supposed to end housing discrimination and segregation. For decades, it sat all but ignored, except for a few instances of reform in some states, Julian said.

But in summer 2015, two government edicts rolled down.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the ICP lawsuit against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs that housing policies that discriminate against minorities violate the Fair Housing Act, even if those policies aren’t specifically racist in intent.

A month later, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, under Obama’s direction, ordered cities and municipalities across the nation to address past segregation in their housing policies and remove current barriers to racial integration — or risk losing funding.

A sea change is afoot, but whether it will translate into widespread reform remains to be seen, said Ann Lott, who heads a part of ICP that works to place low-income housing in high-opportunity areas. And how President-elect Donald Trump and his administration might change the balance in all this remains to be seen.

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, Trump’s pick to lead HUD, has criticized the Obama directive, labeling it a “mandated social-engineering scheme.”

In any case, ICP has helped private developers build five different affordable multifamily complexes in affluent suburbs in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, apartments so upscale-looking that passers-by never would guess most tenants — but not all — pay below-market rents or receive voucher subsidies from the government.

There are five such developments in the San Antonio area. At least one of them triggered a furious outbreak of NIMBY when the builder broke ground without telling residents of a nearby middle-class subdivision that subsidized housing was coming to their semi-rural neighborhood, nestled just outside the city limits.

Emergency meetings were called. An online petition signed. Some subdivision residents up and sold their homes and moved.

It’s all part the landscape when trying to diversify suburbia, said ICP’s Lott. Even when armed with a favorable legal verdict, her job can be an uphill climb, she said, given the antipathy that affluent residents often show upon learning they may soon live next to the working poor.

“Great victories in the courtroom don’t automatically mean housing on the ground,” she said.

Toward suburbia

In fall 2015, Lott piloted her SUV away from ICP headquarters in Dallas, and set forth down the highway, toward the outer-ring towns where her nonprofit has prevailed in bringing low-income housing to resource-rich areas.

An example of the carrot technique is Frisco, with 150,000 residents just north of Dallas where the median household income is $115,000.

City leaders weren’t keen on government-assisted housing coming to their town. None had been built in over two decades; out of 14,000 housing units, only 276 were affordable to low-income families. Then ICP offered to give the city $2 million if it would pass it on to a qualified low-income tax-credit developer. The nonprofit made it clear a lawsuit potentially waited in the wings, Lott said.

After some dawdling, the city agreed. In 2013, North Court Villas opened, a tidy, 134-unit brick apartment complex that would be at home in any middle-class enclave.

Like with all low-income tax-credit properties, tenants must earn 60 percent or less of the area median income, and pay below-market rates that are tied to their income level. By law, tax-credit property owners — unlike private landlords — can’t in most cases turn away Section 8 voucher-holders, who get subsidies that limit their portion of housing costs to 30 or 40 percent of their income.

North Court Villa tenants include school cafeteria employees, maintenance workers, entry-level first-responders — people who work hard but still can’t afford the $280,000 median housing price in Frisco, Lott said.

Lott drove to McKinney, another affluent city north of Dallas. In 2008, ICP approached civic leaders and the McKinney Housing Authority, offering to help them build an affordable apartment complex in the tony western part of the city, which had no such housing. They refused. NIMBYism broke out full-throttle.

ICP sued, charging the city and housing authority with biased housing practices. It prevailed. A consent decree in 2009 had ICP agreeing to provide $1 million for the new affordable housing project, which the city passed on to a developer.

Last year, the Millennium opened, a four-story, 164-unit property so trendy-looking it would seem more a home for high-end hipsters than low-wage workers, with glittering swimming pool, play area, barbecue grills, media room. As at other tax-credit properties, perks include after-school homework help and snacks for kids in the community center, an acknowledgment that many tenants are single, working mothers with young children.

Ninety percent of the units are affordable, the other 10 percent market rate, a nod to the au courant idea that affordable housing works best when tenants represent a mix of affluent and low-income.

Brandon L. Bolin, the developer who built the Millennium — Lott, who often runs interference between builders and city officials, helped him snag the deal — is in the midst of creating a second tax-credit property just down the road.

“Some of the political leaders who opposed the Millennium came to the grand opening,” he said, standing in the tastefully appointed community center. “They were just floored. It exceeded everyone’s expectations.”

To get a sense of the savings involved in subsidized housing: A three-bedroom loft at the Millennium costs $455 a month for a tenant earning 30 percent of the McKinney area median income of $81,000. The market rate rent for the same loft is $1,300.

Like at other low-income apartments in high-opportunity areas, the Millennium was fully leased soon after opening. Now there’s a wait list.

“Demand for this kind of housing far outstrips supply,” Lott said.

The impetus of NIMBY

Most NIMBY reactions are fueled by fear, Lott said — that property values will go down, that crime will go up with the presence of low-cost housing, although research shows that rarely happens, especially with the type of quality, small-scale apartments favored in today’s competitive tax-credit process.

Tenants who live in these properties can’t have violent or felony convictions in their backgrounds, or a history of not paying rent, Lott said.

Perhaps the best proof of the benign impact of affordable housing in high-opportunity areas is the Mount Laurel development in New Jersey, the predecessor of ICP and similar programs around the nation.

A five-year controlled study found that not only did affluent neighbors not suffer when subsidized housing came to the ritzy suburbs of New Jersey, the low-income residents of that housing thrived.

Unemployment and welfare payments plummeted, as did rates of mental illness. The children of the working poor graduated from high school in record numbers, with many going on to college.

“If this had been a study for a new mental health drug, it would have been a blockbuster,” said Adam Gordon, associate director of the Fair Share Housing Center in New Jersey.

In Texas, the tax-credit scoring process now includes incentives for developers who would build in low-income areas, as long as their plans include bonafide revitalization efforts.

Some argue the move to push the poor into richer neighborhoods has hurt attempts to revitalize crumbling central neighborhoods, destroying fragile communities that have been in place for generations.

“Absolutely, we’ve seen a drop in funding,” said Dorothy Hopkins, CEO of Frazier Revitalization Inc., a nonprofit that works to revitalize an impoverished, 1,100-acre area of South Dallas that is home to some 8,000 African-American residents. “Our projects are not able to score high enough to get funding, because you need things like good schools to get points. What the (ICP) lawsuit did was either force the poor to move to high-opportunity areas, or force them into the housing stock that’s available (in the inner city). It perpetuates the slum lord issue.”

Steve Glickman, head of the Economic Innovation Group, which studied levels of economic distress in cities nationwide, said moving poor people to richer areas “isn’t a very realistic systemwide policy.”

“The more you drain (poor) communities of the best talent, you really condemn those who are left behind,” he said.

ICP’s Julian said pitting revitalization against moving the poor is a “red herring;” there’s room for both.

North Side NIMBYism

The San Antonio Housing Authority, which provides housing assistance to more than 65,000 clients, has no program that inflates voucher subsidies to allow recipients to move to more affluent, “high-opportunity” areas of the city, spokeswoman Rosario Neaves said.

But last November, HUD announced that 24 selected cities, including San Antonio, must begin calculating voucher subsidies by ZIP code, versus metropolitan area, thereby elevating subsidies in some cases and enabling recipients to better afford higher rents in low-poverty neighborhoods.

The program begins in 2018, a HUD news release states.

Right now, of the 31 percent of voucher holders who live outside Loop 410 — about 4,100 — about half live in areas where the poverty rate is below 20 percent, Neaves said. Less than one-quarter of the 13,000 voucher holders overall live in such low-poverty areas.

In addition to the problem of too-low subsidies, “we don’t have enough landlords in high-opportunity areas willing to take vouchers,” Neaves said. Families also might be reluctant to leave neighborhoods where they have jobs, access to health care and other long-term ties, she added.

The rental voucher program isn’t the only one that has inadvertently served to perpetuate residential income segregation.

A study two years ago found 75 percent of residents of SAHA’s 70 public housing properties — what used to be called “projects,” amounting to more than 6,000 units — live in census tracts plagued by persistent poverty.

To date, SAHA hasn’t used its state-allotted tax-credits to build SAHA-operated housing in affluent areas, using such funding instead to maintain and renovate its vast fleet of aging properties and to build or redevelop new ones in low-income areas that are being revitalized, Neaves said.

SAHA operates more than 7,000 mixed-income units at 46 properties, through partnerships with nonprofits and other entities, none of which are located in predominantly Anglo, high-opportunity neighborhoods.

But in recent years, private developers have built five tax-credit properties in San Antonio’s suburbs, even without a group like ICP acting as champion.

These developments have not been without controversy.

In far northwestern Bexar County, the $17 million Juniper’s Edge apartment complex — all but six of the 108 units are below-market rate — stirred up dust when the developer, NRP Group, broke ground in spring 2015 without informing residents at the nearby Silver Oaks subdivision.

The complex is located outside the boundaries of the homeowners association, so NRP isn’t required to notify them.

Many of those living in the 1,700-home enclave just outside Loop 1604, where scrub brush competes with strip malls and the median home price is $188,000, reacted in anger.

Ernestine Alejandro, who was on the safety committee of the HOA and had a daughter at the highly rated elementary school, didn’t know about the construction until a neighbor texted her to say she was selling their home and moving.

But the real anger centered on the fact that Bexar County Precinct 2 Commissioner Paul Elizondo never reached out to the neighborhood to inform residents of the impending low-income project, she said.

An emergency meeting was held at the elementary school. Alejandro said Elizondo’s office returned one call from the HOA, then stopped calling back. An online petition was created, eventually receiving 1,200 signatures, stating the planned complex posed a “socioeconomic detriment.”

But approval for the project already had been granted. Since the development isn’t within the Silver Oaks HOA boundary, residents’ opposition wouldn’t have counted anyway.

Elizondo said through a spokesperson that “he worked to get the developer in touch with the HOA and the residents to address their questions and concerns.”

That fall, NRP officials met with more than 100 Silver Oaks residents.

“A main thing was the worry of kids with no supervision, up to no good, with no family foundation, looking for acceptance from gangs,” Alejandro said in fall 2015.

She and many subdivision residents were relieved to learn most tenants would be “working mothers with young children. And they can’t have two or three families living in one apartment.”

As at other tax-credit properties, tenants must have income equal to 21/2 times the monthly rent. (Income can be disability payments or other government benefits; the rule doesn’t include voucher recipients.) A Juniper’s Edge three-bedroom unit for a tenant who earns 30 percent of the area median income of $63,400 will pay $297. At market rate, the same unit will cost $925.

Having a personal vehicle is a must for tenants of outer-ring developments, since public transportation rarely ventures that far outside urban routes.

As forklifts moved dirt around the complex site, Alejandro said she and other residents were pleased with NRP’s efforts to work with them. The developer, for example, planted 17 oak trees to create a buffer between one resident’s back fence and the complex parking lot.

But there were hiccups. Alejandro said NRP changed the property’s design without informing residents, a change that puts the complex too close to her back fence.

The tenants “will have full sight into our backyards,” she said, pointing at the complex, which to the casual eye seemed a good football field away. “My daughter plays in the backyard on the trampoline, in her bathing suit.”

The design change arose from a need to save trees and build a county-required detention pond at the property’s entrance, said Jason Arechiga, NRP development project manager.

The company is not required to tell adjacent property owners about changes within the site, he said.

Juniper’s Edge was completed in September, and it already is fully leased.

Aside from some grousing over the noise created when workers poured concrete at 4 a.m. and tested the complex’s fire alarms on a Friday evening, complaints from the subdivision have died down, he said.

For her part, Alejandro, who’s no longer on the HOA board, said NRP kept only one “verbal promise” out of five — that only emergency vehicles going to the complex could use the gate connected to her subdivision.

“My main concerns are the fire alarms that go off constantly at all hours of the night and the kids (who are) unsupervised, teenagers in particular, while their parent is working either late hours or second jobs,” she wrote in an email in November. “Keep in mind that I’m a single parent, too, so I’m not judging and can sympathize.”

When the picturesque, $22.4 million Emerald Village opened its doors in January 2015, it brought affordable housing to a part of San Antonio distinctly bereft of it. Another NRP tax-credit development on the far North Side, the 144-unit property nestles on a hill just outside Loop 1604 and a short drive from upscale Stone Oak.

Driving by it in fall 2015, Brittnay Kolbasa figured it was outside her financial range. A 23-year-old nursing student and part-time hospital worker, she and her fiance, Christopher Olson, another hospital worker, and their young son had moved to San Antonio from Racine, Wisconsin, escaping high unemployment and lack of opportunity.

Staying with her parents near Schertz, they despaired of being able to get a decent place of their own because of San Antonio’s “high cost of living,” she said.

Kolbasa stopped by the complex anyway, not knowing some units were subsidized. When she discovered her and Christopher’s hospital salaries qualified them for one of the 114 low-income units, she had to pinch herself.

“There’s nothing like this back in Racine,” she said, playing with Jaxon, 4, in the spacious living room of the three-bedroom unit, for which they pay $785 a month. “We’re just very blessed to live here, for my son to be able to grow up in a place like this.”

Two months ago, Kolbasa and her fiance were able to buy a house on the North Side for $130,000 — a dream made possible because of the money they were able to save while living at Emerald Village for a year.

Saving the East Side

Given the challenges of moving low-income people to the suburbs, it’s understandable why a city might want to focus on fixing the inner city.

In fall 2015, Mike Etienne steered his black SUV through EastPoint, the Promise Zone’s “initial target area” where a combined $53.4 million in federal grants are bringing affordable housing and “cradle-to-career” services to a community of 18,000, where the poverty rate is 31 percent and 11 percent of residents are out of work.

Another $920,000 grant seeks to bring down the crime rate in this historically African-American but now majority Hispanic side of town. Officials have leveraged the federal grants to bring in millions more from private investors, the city and other sources.

Etienne drove past the site of the old Wheatley Courts public housing project, where construction, under the auspices of SAHA, was busily under way to turn it into the architectural crown of the Promise Zone, East Meadows, an amenities-rich complex where 70 percent of units are reserved for low-income tenants, the rest market rate.

Next will come affordable housing for seniors and the disabled, as well as new single-family homes, Etienne said. Vacant and owner-occupied houses in need of repair will be rehabbed.

Street and sidewalk improvements already were happening, as were business facade improvements. Community gardens and linear parks and urban farms will compliment upscale lofts being constructed by private developers, some already leased.

He sketched a picture of an urban Shangri-La, a place where brick-and-mortar projects are enhanced by education and social services reforms undertaken by a host of agencies and nonprofits under the guiding arm of the United Way.

“Our whole intent is to make sure East Meadows is not surrounded by urban blight,” he said.

Neighborhoods on the periphery of the Promise Zone already had begun gentrifying before the designation took hold. But Etienne stressed that effective revitalization is not just about buildings.

It includes helping adults earn GEDs and job training and parenting skills. It’s about ushering parolees back into society, incubating new businesses, increasing the four-year graduation rate at Sam Houston High School, which already has risen from 45 percent in 2010 to 81 percent last year, he said.

But even Etienne, the zone’s biggest booster, admits the grand urban plan faces endemic challenges — absent fathers and high incarceration rates and addicted parents and domestic violence and child abuse and grandparents raising grandkids and entrenched poverty that has passed down through generations.

He drove to a shabby neighborhood on the rim of the zone, where a 16-year-old recently had been murdered. A year earlier, a pregnant teen was shot in almost the exact same spot. As Etienne’s vehicle passed a boarded-up house, a group of males standing out front in hoodies and T-shirts turned to stare as the car slid by.

“We’ve been noticed,” he said. “They wondering if we’re here to buy drugs. You don’t want to be (in this neighborhood) at night.”

It was that kind of environment that Brown, the single mother who moved to Allen thanks to the ICP voucher mobility-assistance program, wanted to protect her children from.

A former bank employee who became jobless during the recession, Brown, 36, said it was the quality of the schools in Allen that drew her, especially since two of her children have special needs. Her 10-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy; a 3-year-old son recently was diagnosed with autism.

Brown said she’s not worried about her African-American children fitting into a school where most classmates are Anglo: They’re young; they’ll adapt. Any downside of living in suburbia is far outweighed by the pluses, she said.

In her old neighborhood, drugs and prostitution were a daily fact of life, as was a strong — and not always benevolent — police presence.

“I don’t want them exposed to stuff,” Brown said. “I know stuff happens everywhere, but still if I can do my best to decrease their exposure, do my part as a parent, I’m all for it.”

Brown, working toward an online associate’s degree in the medical field, pays $77 a month toward her home’s $1,500 market-rate rent. Her daughter’s $733 monthly disability check keeps the family afloat. An ICP counselor is on hand should Brown encounter any difficulty in her neighborhood.

So far, she’s been amazed at how welcoming her neighbors, many of them Anglo, have been. One brought her a plate of cookies at Christmas. Another built a ramp for her daughter’s wheelchair — for free.

A recent incident drove home how much her life had changed. She was driving along the suburb’s main thoroughfare when her mother, following behind in her car, got caught at a red light. Brown pulled over in her Suburban to wait, flipping on her hazard lights.

“He said, ‘Ma’am, are you OK?’ I told him, yes, I was just waiting for my mother, who got caught by a light. He said, ‘All right, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything.’ And he got in his car and drove away.”

Brown’s eyes grew wide as she recalled this event.

“I thought to myself, ‘Wow, it really is a different world out here.’”